Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged.The U.S. Obliged.

[Judi Lynn]

4. More on the occupation of Haiti by the U.S. which I never knew, from the article:

Soon after the occupation, the American overseers started building roads to connect Haiti’s mountainous interior to its coast. To do so, they resurrected corvée, a 19th-century Haitian law for indentured labor. The law required citizens to work on public works projects near their homes for a few days a year in lieu of paying taxes. But the American military, along with a constabulary it trained and oversaw, seized men and forced them to work far from home for no pay. Rich Haitians paid their way out of indentured labor, but the law entrapped the poor.

Haitians saw this as a return of slavery and revolted. Armed men, called cacos, fled to the mountains and began an insurgency against American forces. Laborers forced into corvée fled their captors and joined the fight. One leader of the cacos, Charlemagne Péralte, invoked Haiti’s revolution against France to call on his countrymen to “throw the invaders into the ocean.”

. . .

The United States responded forcefully. Soldiers bound workers in rope to keep them from fleeing. Anyone who attempted to escape corvée labor was treated like a deserter, and many were shot. As a warning, the Americans killed Péralte and distributed an image of his corpse tied to a door, evoking a crucifixion.

Leaked military documents from the time showed that the “indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time,” with 3,250 Haitians killed. When Congress began investigating in 1921, the American military lowered the number, saying that 2,250 Haitians had been killed in the occupation, a figure Haitian officials denounced as an undercount. As many as 16 American soldiers died, as well.